1. Field of Invention
The invention relates generally to the field of Uninhabited Air Vehicles (UAVs), and more particularly, it relates to a method of training and monitoring a UAV for a specific mission.
2. Description of Related Art
Autonomous unmanned air vehicles (UAV) have great potential for military and civilian use. Clearly, intelligent unmanned vehicles can readily be sent into hostile situations without fear of casualties. In addition, because the aircraft is intelligent, communication with the vehicle is unnecessary thus increasing its undetected surveillance capability.
Current UAVs have not met the degree of safety and reliability required for autonomous operation over populated areas or in airspace shared with commercial aircraft. Autonomy technologies that can provide reflexive responses and rapid adaptation (as exhibited by a pilot) to compensate for a vehicle's structural, perceptual and control limitations are lacking. This is particularly evident when UAV mishap rates are compared to those of piloted systems.
Compared to piloted aircraft systems, current UAVs are designed to be very low cost, use smaller low-power commercial off-the-shelf components and have very limited redundancy. Unfortunately, the lower requirement for reliability has led to higher failure rates. The higher failure rate is seen as somewhat acceptable because it does not mean the loss of human life, except when the vehicle flies over populated areas. It is desirable, however, for a UAV to be able to safely fly over populated areas, to safely share airspace with other piloted vehicles, and to generally improve the mission success rate. For these reasons, the UAV control systems must be capable of rigorously analyzing and predicting component failures and their effects to determine the appropriate response to faults much as a pilot does prior to or as a result of system failure.